I'll admit that my largest intellectual weakness is in the science and technology arena, so for those of you who are more savvy than I, what would you guess is the chance of a kind of technological singularity happening, and when?

To those who don't know, the singularity is described by wikipedia as "a theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence that will 'radically change human civilization, and perhaps even human nature itself.'"

The history of the human race, and moreover, life and the universe, is one of a long progression of many singularities. The Cambrian explosion, the invention of language, the agricultural revolution, the invention of writing, the industrial revolution, and now the electronic revolution. Big ones, relevant to life, seem to be happening between shorter and shorter time scales. It is very easy for everything to completely change.

I AM THE CHOSEN ONE
I AM THE GRAND POOBAH OF DDO
I AM THE BOOGIE MAN
I AM THE REAL LIFE SANTA CLAUSE
I AM THE PARADOXICAL ZEBRA PRANCING THROUGH THE GRASSY PLANES YOUR COGNITIVE EXPERIENCE
I AM THE REINCARNATION OF THE DEAD DREAMS OF HUMANITY
I AM THE DISH WHO RAN AWAY WITH THE SPOON
I am your friend.

Proponents of the singularity typically postulate an "intelligence explosion",[4][5] where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, that might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent's cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human.

It should be called the intelligence singularity or something like that. Once you have an intelligent machine which can at least design a better intelligent machine and then that intelligent machine can design a better intelligent machine, who knows where it ends.

Maybe it will go on till the machine improvement hits a barrier it can't overcome like laws of nature.

Then again, maybe they figure out away around that barrier too........

Let there be light.........

"Seems like another attempt to insert God into areas our knowledge has yet to penetrate. You figure God would be bigger than the gaps of our ignorance." Drafterman 19/5/12

At 10/24/2013 11:12:56 PM, thett3 wrote:I'll admit that my largest intellectual weakness is in the science and technology arena, so for those of you who are more savvy than I, what would you guess is the chance of a kind of technological singularity happening, and when?

To those who don't know, the singularity is described by wikipedia as "a theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence that will 'radically change human civilization, and perhaps even human nature itself.'"

I have a somewhat neo-luddite bias regarding this, even though it will likely be unequivocally good, it still scares me a great deal for some reason.

If one had to put odds on it, then it would be well over 50%. I dare say 90%. Let me put it this way, as a question. Once we understand how something functions what have we failed at replicating or even making better?

There is nothing that is stopping us from replicating human intelligence other than not knowing exactly how we are able to be intelligent. Once we have that down, we will far exceed our bio-intelligence capability. We might even be able to replicate what we know as consciousness.

When you look at our intelligence, we have some huge serious flaws. Look at data around the unreliability of eye witness or our ability to store false memories. Wack a little bit of the brain and all of sudden we can recognize faces or speak. Look how poorly we evaluate data by involving preconceived notions and allowing us them to influence our thinking.

Heck for as much we talk about something being genetic versus learned and putting different significance on whether a behavior is learned or genetic, we all avoid the point that even if something is learned, you don't just unlearn it.Artificial intelligence would be able to unlearn something to have that fresh perspective at any time. Our brains can't unlearn (try to unlearn riding a bike).

When you look at it, our intelligence is so flawed in so many ways, one has to wonder how we got this far. I am with the belief though, once we get better understanding how we learn, the artificial intelligence will far exceed us.